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Angela L. Siemens

Wichita, KS | Distinguished Ag Alumni: 2011

Angie Siemens grew up on a diversified
livestock and grain farm near Connersville,
Indiana, the oldest of five sisters. Her
father didn’t hire any help. The strong
Midwest work ethic instilled on the farm
has served Siemens well in a career
dedicated to developing and implementing
quality assurance and safety principles and
management practices.
As vice president of technical services
for the Cargill Animal Protein division of
Cargill, Inc., Siemens manages food safety for
a $17 billion beef, pork, turkey, and meat
processing company. She oversees all aspects
of food safety and quality control in 32
facilities in the United States and Canada.
Her expertise in food safety came not in
her formal education but in her working
career. The first weekend of her senior
year at Purdue, she married fellow animal
sciences student Mike Siemens, and the
two would pursue divergent but parallel
paths in which they alternately followed
and led each other’s job choices (he
currently oversees animal welfare efforts
for Cargill’s global meat businesses).
After earning her doctorate in meat
science with a collateral emphasis on
statistics, she went to Washington, D.C.,
as a Congressional Science Fellow, which
both capitalized on her research skills and
shaped her interest in regulatory issues.
To move closer to her husband’s work
in Wisconsin, she spent a year in research
and development at Beatrice Foods, and
the next in an Oscar Mayer Foods plant in
a position for which she was clearly
overqualified. But this period provided
her “a pretty amazing combination of
governmental training, technical training,
and real-world plant experience.” From
that broad base, she moved into the
regulations and requirements group at
Oscar Mayer, which put her on her
progressive track in food safety, in
executive positions at Smithfield Packing
Company and since 2006, at Cargill.
The couple keeps busy with their
9-year-old son, church activities, and 80
acres — although they’re still negotiating
the number of four-legged creatures that
will eventually occupy the property.